Hillary Reiterates: Women's Rights Are Human Rights--Yes!
Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 01:52PM Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Hillary Clinton's speech recommitting the United States to the International Conference on Population and Development's consensus goals ratified by the world 15 years ago. The chandeliered Benjamin Frankin room was kinetic, as men and women from public and private international women's rights and health endeavors greeted one another in a virtual old home week.
I served on the U.S. government delegation to the 5-year evaluation of progress toward achieving the Cairo goals in 1999. But during the Bush administration, not only did the U.S. fail to pull its pledged share of the global load to empower women through health and development programs, the right wing led a vigorous charge to dismantle those efforts. Believe me, people like me weren't invited to take tea in the Ben Franklin Room!
Fortunately, women leaders from other countries refused to go backward. They held back the Bush onslaught. There was a global sigh of relief when President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule as one of his first acts after being inaugurated last year. With Clinton at the helm at State, there's no question women and girls globally have a champion who will work to make sure progress begins again. For as she herself first said in her groundbreaking 1995 speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing: women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. Watch the video of her speech here:
Cairo consensus, Hillary Clinton, International Conference on Population and Development, international family planning, women's heath, women's rights in Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Reproductive Rights, administrative regulations, birth control, executive order, gender equality, global gag rule, reproductive health, reproductive justice
Reader Comments (4)
I wish I had known when this was going to be! I would have loved to have attended!
It was a real moment of inspiration, and there was a moment of chucking when Hillary said we had all been together in the up times and the down times and there have been lots of both.
Here's a very good piece on the speech by Michelle Goldberg in The Daily Beast today:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-08/hillarys-new-health-crusade/full/
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can both make a good speech. I just wish I could believe their fine words. Unfortunately, practical politics being what it is, all too often fine words are just spin to cloak the real agenda. I do not see how, for instance, escalating the war on Afghanistan to support its tottering government of corrupt misogynistic warlords is going to help women and girls there, or how the energy bill Obama touted as such a breakthrough is going to do anything to slow down climate change, or how foisting either of the Green Revolutions on Africa is going to help the impoverished women and girls there. The devil is in the details, as usual, and as long as US policy is circumscribed by conventional wisdom, women and girls will continue to suffer from its results. What credibility will this push for reproductive rights in other nations have if Obama looks the other way while they are rolled back here, in the name of health reform?
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